A buyer's guide to hosted email: What are the options and who are the providers?
E-mail and online communications have become vital aspects of doing business; clear-cut e-mail solutions help you boost productivity while attending to your bottom-line costs. Hosted email solutions provide the bottom-line benefit of avoiding capital expenditures and extra manpower costs, while still offering superior service level guarantees and a feature-rich selection of options well-suited to businesses of any size. There are several ways to get secure email hosting via shared, collocation or virtual providers. Larger enterprises with huge amounts of data may still benefit from a hosted email option, but will want to take advantage of a dedicated hosting server solution rather than a shared arrangement; where the email server is collocated at the hosting facility and maintained by the third party provider. In some collocation arrangements, the customer may even provide the administration as well.
The first decision to make, after deciding to use a hosted solution, is whether to employ a dedicated or shared server at the hosting facility. For smaller businesses, the decision is a simple one; dedicated servers are not required for most small businesses; and a shared arrangement is more than adequate. Small businesses should be reassured that although their email services are being administered on a shared server, each customer?s email is compartmentalized and rigorous security is imposed so that there is no possibility of data leakage.
Typically, email environments that call for more than 60GB of storage space will call for a dedicated arrangement. Backup and archiving, as well as search and retrieval of the archives, are essential components to a hosted environment as well. Retrieval should be easy and fast; determine ahead of time how retrieval is conducted, and whether it can be done individually from a web-based interface. To some degree, the debate over shared or dedicated email servers on the third party provider's platform is rendered moot by the implementation of virtualization, which has become more common; a virtualized environment will allow for greater and easier scalability, while still preserving security and accessibility.
Further, when considering a hosted service, security issues including anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing protection should also be made available. The user will still need to implement their own security measures at the desktop and the gateway, however, the provider should add an additional layer of protection.
Server platform and management
One more important option which is necessary to consider is the server platform itself and how it is managed. A managed facility is most common, especially for shared hosting offerings for small business; however, larger enterprise customers utilizing dedicated servers may opt for an unmanaged, or co-managed arrangement with the collocation or hosting facility.
Hosted email, whether shared or dedicated, is most ideal for smaller organizations and startups which want to avoid capital expenditures. This type of solution offers flexibility and easy scalability, allowing for growth as needed without having to deal with inconvenient upgrades and the provisioning of additional storage or servers. When additional storage or capacity is required, the hosting provider offers it on the fly, typically with no downtime requirement. Furthermore, a managed hosted option offers the advantage of highly skilled technical staff 24 hours a day; which is typically unavailable to a smaller business.
Businesses with a steep requirement for security and oversight, which may be subject to government regulation or oversight, may still prefer the in-house option to ensure rigorous compliance to policy and law. In addition, some organizations that have a heavy need for electronic discovery may benefit from an in-house solution instead. E-discovery may impose a significant time burden, particularly in larger legal cases; and the legal staff may need to conduct an e-discovery search and retrieval against email archives that may result in the retrieval of tens of thousands of email documents.
Dealing with email is a critical issue, and when using a hosted service, the feature set, as well as scalability, uptime, and security are all important considerations. These items should be spelled out in a service level agreement; furthermore, scalability should be afforded on an as-needed basis so that a business can accommodate growth without the need for downtime. Further, self-management administration tools should be available on a web-based interface, which make it easy for the customer to manage their systems.
Pricing can be confusing, and some hosting providers charge a fee for basic service, while offering additional features on an a la carte basis or as a standard 'bundle.' What appears to be less expensive may not necessarily be so. Some services like the new LotusLive, which provides a venue for Notes and Domino customers to move to a hosted platform, affords a great deal of price predictability through a variety of standard bundles.
Services such as Simplicato also offer reliable service and a full range of features, complete with anti-virus and anti-spam services. Dreamhost offers a similar set of security measures, and a custom control panel that allows the end user to easily access administrative features. HostMonster is an example of one provider that offers a service level guarantee with 99.9 percent uptime, definitely a factor that one would want in a provider. However, when examining these service level agreements, look closely to determine what happens if the provider falls below the stated service level. Ideally, if that happens, there will be a remedy, or a penalty imposed against the provider, such as discounted service for the month.
Still others like FuseMail offer flexible, user-defined filters. Larger players like Google have also gotten into the hosting business in a big way, and has broadened their email hosting services to go far beyond simple individual Gmail accounts. Google Apps now offers support for IMAPI, and includes excellent anti-spam functionality.
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